Protective styles find their awesomeness in the fact that they promote or aid hair growth. They do this by making sure that you’re not manipulating your hair as often subsequently leading to breakage. That being said one needs to reconcile themselves to the fact that not every protective style is good for your hair, if it’s too tight or it hurts, it’s not a protective style. And I happened to rediscover the best protective style I’ve had in ages…crochet braids or more specifically Crochet faux locs.

When everyone thinks about crochet braids, they think cornrows until the genius that is Jazz Nicole came up with an individual crochet method, that lets your crochet a strand of hair or a braid or a loc onto a smaller twist or braid of your own hair. You can find a link to that video here.

The method is great, like I said, it’s genius but it’s genius only if you have pre-looped hair. I’ve been wanting to do crochet faux locs but I did not have pre-looped hair. I saw that video and got excited, then I got depressed because I didn’t have pre-looped hair. I purchased 4 packets of Prima R- dread from Emma’s Hair and Beauty (Station Road, Claremont, Cape Town). Each pack starts from R90 depending on length. It looks like this:

So I set out on a quest to find a way to crochet the locs onto my own hair and the awesomeness that is Jesus led me to this YouTube video(yes I prayed, and God answered).

The vlogger, Loulaysious The Savvy Diva’s instructions are super easy to follow you can watch her video above or click the link here. Essentially all you have to do is create a small braid with your own hair. Then crochet a small part of the loc through the braid. Take the small crochet part and wrap it around the braid you have created, then you can wrap the rest of the loc around that and the rest of your braid and that’s it. Make sure you have a latch/crochet hook though.

All in all, this took me about six hours to complete. Before you go crazy and say that’s too much time for any crochet style, remember, I did all of this on individual braids then crocheted the loc on the individual braids.I did this for the first time last year and left the locs straight and they looked like this.

I wanted something a bit different this time and curled the hair using hot water. You can do this by grabbing about 5-6 locs and plaiting them all in a normal braid. You can secure the ends with elastic bands or hairpins. Once you’ve completed the braid, place it in hot water to set the curl or the wave pattern. Leave it in hot water for about 30 seconds to a minute. Take the braid out of the water and undo it and you should have your luscious curls.

Let me know, what do you think of the style and have you guys tried faux locs before? What was your experience?